designboom · Creativity & design

Synesthesia Visualized as Light on a Violinist's Garment

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, violinist Audrey Wright wore a "Luminous Being" garment, a project by her and Geoff Robertson. They are developing "PRISMBODY," aiming to make composer Stephanie Ann Boyd's synesthetic experience of music visible through light.

The project translates Boyd's synesthesia, where sound is perceived with color, into a visual display. Robertson likens the garment's lights to "subtitles" for the music, representing Boyd's color associations.

Robertson designed the garment with over 3,000 LEDs across 46 panels. It captures Wright's playing, feeding audio data into visual effects, and runs at approximately 30 frames per second.

Wright calls the wearable a "sensory musical instrument," while Robertson sees his role as playing the visual system in tandem with her violin.

Boyd's synesthesia, inseparable from her musical understanding, forms the basis of "PRISMBODY." She is codifying these associations into the composition.

Garment 2.0 features RGB LEDs for a wider color range, transitioning the wearable from multisensory to multimodal. The goal is chromatic precision for Boyd to recognize her perceptions.

Future iterations include transparent panels wrapping fully around Wright for a 360-degree visual surface. External spotlights are also evolving.

The "PRISMBODY" work was presented as still in progress, highlighting the challenge of translating one person's perception of music into a universally experienced image.

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